1. Field of the Invention:
The present invention relates to a method and a system of specification processing and, more particularly, to a method and system adapted to input design specifications (current specifications of a system under development), an expert knowledge of the system based on the design specifications, and expert knowledge of each field that the system belongs to, and to utilize these bodies of knowledge and information for editing and outputting documents of the object system to be developed and for verifying its design specifications.
2. Description of the Prior Art:
To improve the reliability of a system, it is indispensable to define clear-cut specifications that permit appropriate design of the system. To define the specifications requires that the system be described in the following manner:
(a) The description should be free of ambiguity. PA0 (b) It should be easy to verify the description on a static basis. PA0 (c) It should be easier to write and read the system specifications than to prepare the corresponding source code. PA0 (a) Highly practical specification methods were not proposed. Thus systems had to be designed in specifications based on designers' experience and intuitive expertise. PA0 (b) Because of the lack of highly practical specification methods, documents had to be prepared in natural language based on designers' experience and intuitive expertise. PA0 (c) Each system was verified not in the specifying stage but in a separate testing stage. PA0 (d) The design specifications were verified in text format. PA0 (1) The specifications prepared according to practice (a) above contained appreciable degrees of ambiguity. PA0 (2) The documents prepared according to practice (b) above relied significantly on designers' experience and intuitive expertise. A row of expert knowledge constituting these documents made it difficult to understand what was written in them. PA0 (3) The documents prepared according to practice (b) above were not necessarily executable as they were. It was impossible to verify in document form whether these specifications were correct. PA0 (4) Verifying the specifications placed heavy burdens on the testing stage in which the verifying was done. In addition, it was difficult to detect in the testing stage all errors that might have been incorporated since the design stage. The specifications of each process should be verified within that process. This leads to improved system reliability. Having to detect design errors only in the testing stage detracts from the reliability of the system under development. PA0 (5) Practice (d) above failed to provide high levels of understandability for the verification of the design specifications.
The following is what was customarily practiced in the prior art design stage:
The prior art practices described above posed the following problems: